Bundles like Inbox could be coming to Gmail

The closure of Google’s Inbox has caused a great deal of distress to many users, some of our team included. The functionality of the app was excellent, helping users stay on top of the masses of email that come in daily.

One of the loved features of Inbox was the message bundles based on content. This feature may be coming to Gmail soon if the APK teardown by 9to5Google is any guide.

As with early access to systems, apps and hardware the testing may represent the final product. While these code snippets located show some intent to bring the function, there is no guarantee it will appear in the final release.

There are a few items of note in the teardown starting with additional automatic labels:

<string name=”label_name_purchases”>Purchases</string>

<string name=”label_name_travel”>Travel</string>

<string name=”travel_onboarding_title”>Your new Travel label</string>

<string name=”travel_onboarding_summary”>Emails like this will automatically appear in your Travel label</string>

<string name=”smartmail_card_flight_arrival”>Arrival</string>

<string name=”smartmail_card_flight_departure”>Departure</string>

One interesting addition, similar to functionality that Android already offers is a specific call feature within Gmail. How this will actually look in the app is yet to be seen, but the app is likely to scrape phone numbers and offer you the ability to call the company involved.

<string name=”smart_mail_contact_call_action”>Call</string>

Finally, much like was available in Inbox – you can collapse an entire section of mail to only have the header present. This is very useful if you’ve got a number of mailing lists, forums or other mass marketing you’re subscribed to.

<string name=”cd_smartmail_card_collapsed”>%1$s, %2$s – Card Collapsed</string>

<string name=”cd_smartmail_card_expanded”>%1$s, %2$s – Card Expanded</string>

It’s great to see that Google are bringing more of the functionality from their popular Inbox by Gmail to the Gmail interface. Given the huge popularity of Inbox let’s be honest, it’s about a year too late to work towards feature parity.